Financial Times; Jun 14, 2003
WORLD NEWS: Pro-Saddam 'fighters' or feuding neighbours? By Charles Clover
When US forces raided the town of Thuluiya this week, in the largest anti-terrorist sweep in Iraq since the end of the war, they may have struck a key guerrilla base - or simply stumbled into an old feud between neighbouring towns.
Thuluiya, north of Baghdad on a picturesque bend in the Tigris river, is a largely Sunni Muslim village, inhabited by the Jbur tribe, one of the largest in Iraq. Not 20km down the road lies Balad, a mainly Shia city with years of pent-up hostility to the surrounding Sunni towns.
Nabil Daweesh Moham-med, former police chief and now mayor of Balad, readily takes credit for helping US forces zero in on Thuluiya. He accuses the sheikh of the Thuluiya branch of the Jbur tribe, Abdul Hamid Shweish, of being the ringleader of Ba'ath party guerrillas who have been raiding US forces in the area for the past two weeks.
"Sheikh Abdul Hamid is the lead Ba'athist, he is the man who is really running the province. Don't go to Thuluiya unless you want a bullet in your car: it's the most dangerous place in Iraq," he says.
US forces apparently decided this merited action.
The assault on Thuluiya, dubbed Operation Peninsula Strike, comprised 4,000 soldiers from the 4th infantry division arriving in the dead of night on Monday on tanks, trucks, helicopters and river patrol boats. Over the next few days they arrested 397 residents, virtually all from the Jbur tribe.
Four Iraqis died and four US soldiers were injured, the US said. Apart from small arms, one mortar and two rocket propelled grenades were found. "Although there were a relatively small amount of weapons found that was only one of our objectives," said an officer.
No high ranking Ba'ath party cadres were found either.
The sweep did little to snuff out the violence in the area. Yesterday US forces killed 27 guerrillas in a firefight outside Balad, after they ambushed a US tank column.
Mr Shweish, alleged mastermind of the Ba'ath party terrorists, turns out to be a kindly, hospitable man in white headscarf who is anxious to clear his tribe's reputation. But he proves just as adept at pointing the finger of blame as Mr Mohammed.
"The American soldiers got their information from sources in Balad. That's very clear. And in Balad there are Iranian agents, from the Badr Corps [Iranian-backed militia operating in Iraq]. They create ideas about our area with the Americans."
Col Ron Thorsett, head of the 308th US army civil affairs brigade based at an airbase outside Thuluiya, said he was aware of the bad blood between Thuluiya and Balad. "Balad is a Shia island in a rural Sunni sea," he said.
Iraq's majority Shia have long been oppressed by successive Sunni- dominated governments. US officials acknowledge that tension has also increased following their appointment of a Jburi -aformer general in the Republican Guard - as governor of the province.
Lt Col Bill Macdonald, spokesman for the 4th division, meanwhile defended US intelligence gathering techniques. "We have specially trained soldiers who work with local people, to gather local information and send it up the chain of command. And we devote a lot of resources to vetting that information and making decisions about its reliability. And let me emphasise that we use more than just human intelligence to identify targets."
If US forces were misled by a local feud, however, it would not be the first time. Time and again in the recent Afghanistan campaign, US forces relied on local information in their hunt for al-Qaeda, which turned out to be nothing more than local rivals fingering each other.
Mr Shweish described the night of the raid, when many in the village tried to flee into the river to escape what they thought were bandits. In the days since, he has met several US commanders to try to clear his tribe's name.
He admits that several residents of the town formerly served in the Iraqi military, an honourable profession for rural Sunni tribesmen.
"Is our crime that we were part of the state?" he asked. "It's true, some of us had good positions. Others of us wound up in prison and were executed. But did we ever fight against you? If we had fought against you, America would not have taken Baghdad in two days, believe me. None of us has raised a weapon against America during or since the war -
this is the truth.
"Now I think [the Americans] have started to correct their views about us, because they haven't found any heavy weapons, only a few Kalashnikovs. They didn't find weapons of mass destruction. They didn't find Saddam Hussein."